There are two prescription drug discount measures on the ballot. This is the one that is endorsed by the drug companies. Need I say any more?

My endorsement: NO on prop. 78

This is the second prescription drug discount measure. This one is endorsed by the various social services organizations. Basically, this measure would create a new organization in the state government that’s job was to negotiate drug prices with the companies and then pass those reduced drug prices on to the patients. Because of the realities of limited supply, they’ll also be responsible for determining who is going to get these cheaper drugs.

Somehow I’m pretty pesimistic about yet ANOTHER government health care organization being created. We’ve already got to many. Add this to my normal stance of vote no when in doubt and you get my endorsement.

My endorsement: NO on prop. 79

Most people don’t even know that this proposition is on the ballot. This is the stealth measure that is totally forgotten amongst a list of emotionally charged props.

The goal of this measure is to clean up the mess that caused the electricity shortages a few years ago. It decides to go the route or re-regulating a portion of that which was deregulated.

This is another case of a partially baked proposal. The problem a few years ago was that the front end price of electricity was set by the PUC but the back end price (the price that our electric company paid) was being determined by the market. The result was that the electric companies were paying WAY more for electricity than they were able to charge for it.

I think the right solution to the problem is to deregulate the front end. When consumers can reap the benefits of dramatically reducing their electric bills by using less energy at peak times, the price of electricity will follow a more traditional supply vs. demand curve.

This proposition takes us the other direction by forcing more entities back under the regulation of the PUC. The PUC is one of the worst run organizations in the country. Not much more needs to be said.

My endorsement: NO on prop. 80

Well, the smoke and mirrors campaigners are at it again. This time they’re calling foul on the Prop. 75 proponents. In this article the president of the CTA claims “their campaign rivals broke the law by sending an e-mail to 90,000 schoolteachers at work-site computers claiming that their union is on the verge of bankruptcy.”

At first I was unsure if what they were claiming was illegal was that their opponents lied or misled. That brought scoffs of large laughter from yours truly. Lock up every member of the CTA for aiding and abetting and put every CTA official in a maximum security prision if that’s against the law.

No, what she’s claiming is illegal is that these messages were sent to the teachers work e-mail addresses.

Uh huh…

OK, I’m as big an opponent of spam as there is but this is not spam. Unsolicited mail is not the same thing as spam. If I send a message to my brother asking him if he wants to come to see me sometime, unless he asked me to e-mail him about coming to visit, that message is unsolicited. No, spam is the sending of messages indiscriminately to as many people as possible. Specifically getting the e-mail addresses of a bunch of teachers and sending them a message about their union is not spam, it’s politics.

But that’s not really what the CTA boss is trying to get them on. There is a clause in the California Education code that says you can’t misuse equipment that belongs to the school. By sending a bunch of e-mails to the teachers at their work computers, a bunch of computers were “misused”.

What a hunk of bunk. If the e-mails had been sent from a school computer, you might be able to claim that. But the schools setup these accounts so that the teachers can receive outside messages that are relevant to their job. It’s hard to argue that this e-mail is not relevant.

What the CTA is REALLY upset about is that it is targeting its members. This is really a turf war.

Furthermore, the point about bankruptcy is more viable than one would think. Here’s the scenario: The CTA is paying $50 million to stop Prop. 75. However, they don’t have this money right now. So they’re assessing the teachers $60 each for the next 3 years. That’s where the problem comes in. If 75 passes, they could be in a situation where the majority of their union members opt out of the political campaign contributions. Since that $50 million can not come from regular dues, they could conceivably have a $50 million dollar bill they can’t pay. Add this to the fact that they already have $34 million in outstanding loans and you can see why they could (and the operative word is could) be in real trouble if Prop. 75 passes. Toss in the fact that the actual statement in the e-mail is “Our current leadership is on the verge of bankrupting the CTA to fund a political agenda that many of us do not support.” and one can see why the content of the message if far from deceptive.

Need it be any more clear why the CTA is going to do whatever it takes including morgage it’s future to defeat Prop. 75? They will lie; they will deceive; they will call foul over minor or false things; they will distract; they will demonize; they will smear; they will scream at the top of their lungs; they will do WHATEVER it takes.

I’ve said for a LONG time that allowing indian gambling was a bad thing for California. More importantly I’ve said for the same period of time that indian gambling has nothing to do with “Native American Self Reliance” and everything to do with greed and a desired monopoly on gambling.

Well, it’s becoming more and more clear how right I am/was. Case in point, measure G on the ballot in Yuba county (that’s north of Sacramento for those not familiar with the intricacies of California geography). Measure G would give public support for a indian casino in the county at a defined location off of highway 65. Guess who the major financial supporter of the ‘No on G’ campaign is? If you guessed the indian casino about 30 miles down highway 65 in the Sacramento area called Thunder Valley, you’d be right!

See it’s not about “self reliance for all native americans”. If it was, the Thunder Valley folks would be happy to see another casino join in the mix so that they too could be “self reliant”. No, it’s about greed and the Thunder Valley folks, now that they’ve got their cash cow rolling, are willing to protect in whatever way necessary their cash cow.

See this article for the needed references.

California politics just isn’t getting much press right now. But just in case my handful of readers missed it, the governor vetoed the illegal immigrants drivers license bill. From the article, I actually have sympathy for the bill’s author Gil Cedillo. Schwarzenegger could have been a lot more clear that he was going to veto the bill no matter what provisions were put in it. Instead he kept listing provisions he might be willing to sign a bill with and Cedillo kept adding those provisions to get the bill through.

Nevertheless, I’m glad this bill didn’t pass.

…then read this article. There is no question that big unions like the CTA (see below) actively take money from their union members for political campaigning without concern as to whether the membership supports the idea and the only way to opt-out is to end their membership in the union. In the above example from the article, the CTA just assessed each member (and that’s every full time teacher in every California public school) $60 for each of the next 3 years to pay for political campaigning without a vote of the membership. The decision was made by the union officials. This increase will raise $50 million for political campaigning.

That suggests that there are about 270 thousand teachers in California. That seems little high to me… geez, I guess not. According to the CTA website, the “CTA represents more than 335,000 employees of California schools, colleges and universities”. Other sites suggest we credential about 30,000 new teachers every year.

OK, there are more political organizations that I don’t like than I care to count but there are a few that really go beyond the pale to truly piss me off. One of the first things one can do to get on my bad side is to blatantly lie or mislead. I’m not talking about supporting a position that I disagree with and calling that lying, I’m talking about saying things that are just not true. The second thing one can do is to constantly use distraction tactics to avoid a topic. You know, when some political issue comes up that affects a group, that group always re-directing it back to a different topic, possibly completely unrelated, that they feel they have more sympathy in regards to.

See I can take organizations like Planned Parenthood. They’ve got a simple goal, one that I happen to horribly disagree with, but a goal that they’re willing to publicize and argue on those terms. In their mind, abortion should be available to all, is not really a moral choice but a practical choice, and that children should be educated about every sexual practice available out there and free to experiment as they choose, once properly educated on the benefits and risks of each. They’re pretty honest that this is their perspective. As much as I think it is morally abhorrent, I can at least give them the credit of being honest human beings. Misguided and bent on a policy that will destroy millions of lives and harmfully affect billions of others but honest nevertheless.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) gives me no such room for honesty praise. They recently released a political add regarding proposition 74. For those not in the know, prop. 74 will increase the years of service required for tenure from 2 years to 5 years and will make it easier for schools to fire tenured teachers by allowing schools boards to fire a teacher after two consecutive unsatisfactory performance evaluations.

One can make arguments either way about whether this is a good thing. But the CTA has no interest in making an argument about the subject at hand. Here’s the text of the ad:

STEPHANIE FLOYD-SMITH, seventh-grade teacher: Governor, you’ve already broken your promises on education. Now you’re sponsoring Proposition 74, a ballot measure that allows one principal to fire a teacher without giving a reason – or even a hearing. While doing nothing to improve teacher training.

RENEE STEWART, elementary school parent: Parents like me are voting no on Prop. 74 to send the governor a message: Stop playing politics with our schools. And get to work on smaller class sizes, up-to-date textbooks, and restoring music and art classes – the things our kids really need.

You can see the video here (requires the stupid real player)

Let’s start with the blatant 100% lies, shall we?:

1. “allows one principle to fire a teacher”: No principle can fire a teacher. The school board must do that. (Of course a principles recommendation caries a lot of weight.)
2. “fire a teacher without giving a reason”: Performance evaluations, 2 unsatisfactory of which are necessary to fire a tenured teacher, by their very nature say what a teacher is doing well and doing wrong. Particularly since those evaluations would be used by the school board to determine whether to accept the recommendation of a principle to fire a teacher, if a teacher gets fired, those two evaluations will make it pretty clear what the reason is.

In fact the only thing that the first person says that has a HINT (and I emphasize HINT) of truth is the statement “or even a hearing”. But even that is very deceptive. Although it is true that teachers aren’t guaranteed an explicit “hearing” , they will have had their performance reviews with the principle, giving them a chance to make their case to the principle and most likely when the principle makes the recommendation to the board to fire the teacher, that process will occur in some forum that allows the teacher some input. So even in that one statement that is not 100% lying, it is very deceptive. Overall, they’re lying and there’s no other way to see it.

OK, on to the re-directing. The ad mentions the following “issues” that have nothing to do with prop. 74:

-“Governor, you’ve already broken your promises on education”: OK, so maybe he has. Does this measure have anything to do with those promises?
-“get to work on smaller class sizes”: Um, does this measure prevent smaller class sizes? Does it have ANYTHING to do with class size?
-“up-to-date textbooks”: Again, help me please, are we on topic?
-“and restoring music and art classes”: Still waiting…
-“the things our kids really need”: You forgot to mention food! Our kids need food! What is this ballot measure doing to help kids that starve? Don’t vote for this ballot measure because it doesn’t help one single starving kid!

I mean, all of those statements are just crap that have nothing to do with the ballot measure.

But my overall point is this: For crying out loud, make an argument against the measure! Is that too much to ask? Instead of lying about it and trying to re-direct to other issues, tell me what is wrong with this measure. Do we have great teachers who should be allowed to teach and shouldn’t be worrying about whether their principle likes them? That sounds like an argument you could make. But they don’t make that argument because they know that it doesn’t strike a chord with Californians who are sick and tired of bad public school teachers. Does the measure mostly impact new teachers who are the life-blood of the future of teaching and leaves the tenured teachers mostly untouched because of the lengthy evaluation process? That sounds like a reasonable argument. But that would piss off their existing union members that includes all the tenured teachers. Do you not like the measure because it affects the job security of your union members? OK, that is an argument that you could make (and it is the REAL reason they’re campaigning against it). But they’re not going to get sympathy for that from California voters who could only DREAM of having the job security that teachers have.

So, stuck without a good argument to make, they resort to lying and re-direction and that’s why I despise the CTA.

Only 22 senators voted against Roberts for Supreme Court justice. Fienstien was one of them. The only reason she seems at all moderate is because the other senator from the state (Barbara Boxer) is so liberal that the Green party won’t take her if she decided to abandon the democratic party because it is being “taken over by conservatives”.

OK, not that I think I’m going to be influencing many people with my endorsements, but I plan on making endorsements, either for or against, all 4 of the ballot measures that Governor Schwarzenegger has gotten on the ballot. I have yet to do the necessary research to make an informed decision on any of them, so I’m not ready to make any endorsements yet, but I will give you my first impressions on each:

Prop 74: Teacher tenure. This measure delays tenure for teachers to 5 years after the are hired at a school instead of 2. Tenure is a concept that was originally created for University professors to allow them academic freedom to support research and ideologies that may not be popular with the administration. The idea was that after a professor had proven themselves as a good professor, they were then free to do whatever research they wanted and not fear being fired if the results were unpopular. There is much good in the idea of tenure. However, I’ve believed for a long time that tenure is not something that K-12 teachers should have. There is no need for it as these teachers do not do research and are not supposed to be supporting ideologies of any sort. There job is to educate children based on the curriculum provided by the State of California. All tenure for K-12 does is protect bad teachers from getting fired. Unless there are some clauses in the ballot measure that extend beyond reducing the value or likelihood that a teacher will receive tenue, I’ll be hard pressed not to vote for Prop 74.

Prop 75: Union member freedom of conscience. This measure is called “paycheck protection” by the supporters, but it is a bogus name. Prop. 75 is very threatening to the unions of California because it requires that any money that is collected form union dues not be used for political purposes unless the union member approves of it. This will take a LOT of power away from unions. Currently unions collect on the order of a couple hundred dollars a month from each employees paycheck for union dues. A significant portion of those dues pay for political campaigning. What unions fear is that since each union member could basically decide not to pay that portion of their union dues, unions would collect far less money for campaigning and would have far less political influence. It used to frustrate me to no end that the CTA, the union Wendy worked for, dumped millions of dollars into political issues that have nothing to do with teaching or schools. Particularly of interest, they’d pump money into abortion campaigns and there was nothing Wendy or I could do to prevent the money she earned from being used for that purpose. What justice is there in that? Unless there is some clause in this bill that stretches the meaning of this bill beyond what I have outlined above, I’ll be hard pressed to vote against it.

Prop 76: Spending limits: This is a ballot measure that limits the budgets for California. This one seems to be the most complicated of the bunch as it calls out limits in lots of different categories, including education. I really don’t understand all the details yet but I’m hesitant to vote for legislation like this. This is really an area where we need to give our legislatures the ability to use their judgment. Things change and I can see how specific limits could place an undo burden on the state. Although a big part of me would like to see our current legislature slapped over the head a few times regarding over spending, it’ll still take a lot of convincing for me to vote for this one.

Prop 77: Redistricting. This in my opinion is the granddaddy of them all that most likely will get an official endorsement from me. One would think that I’m a fan of ballot initiatives from my commentary to date but in principle I’m not. Ideally, the legislature should be passing laws and the people should be electing a legislature that will properly represent them. Frankly, this is not happening right now and the big reason for this is because of the current legislative districts. Right now legislative districts are drawn (i.e. what their borders are) by the legislature. Since job security is a desire every human being has, they have an incentive to create districts in which the likelihood of them getting re-elected goes up. What they do is they draw borders that lump similar minded people together. Heavily Republican biased areas are lumped together with other Republican areas to ensure that the Republican incumbent gets re-elected and the Democratic areas are handled similarly. This has the effect of making the politicians unaccountable to their voters as they’re very unlikely not to get re-elected because of the heavy bias of voters in their district. Or said another way, the politicians are choosing their voters instead of the voters choosing their politicians. Again, I haven’t done the research to ensure that the measure actually does what it says it is going to do and does it in a reasonable fashion, but unless their is some HUGE grievous problem with the actual initiative, I will be endorsing and voting for this one.

I will be doing more research on these matters in the next few weeks and will be posting my comments as I make them. I encourage everyone who reads this to comment as well. I also HEAVILY encourage everyone to actually read the initiative texts, well at least the overview portions of them. I’ve found that the initiatives are easier to read than most people think and are surprisingly neutral in the way the language is written (i.e. it’s not written to deceive). There’s no better way to make a decision than to read the initiative, then read the officially published arguments (as in the voting guide that will be mailed to every registered voter) and make an informed decision based on those arguments, the actual text and your good judgment.